7 Marketing Trends & Insights Every B2B Tech Marketer Needs to Know

B2B marketing strategies target business owners, procurement officers, executives, and more. Meaning, unlike B2C consumers, these business-oriented individuals are trained to think logically and encouraged by financial incentives like a boost in ROI.

So, if you want to promote your products or services to B2B buyers, you need to show them how you can enhance their day-to-day company operations.

That said, here are some trends and insights of B2B marketing that every B2B tech marketer needs to know to help you plan an effective marketing strategy:

Defining Your Buyer Personas is the First Step

The first step when planning your marketing strategy is to define your audience. It implies understanding your target market as individuals in a society, how they behave, where they search for information, and how they make their decisions.

Setting up demographic and psychographic profiles will also help in segmenting your audience for targeted campaigns. Subsequently, it’ll make your marketing strategies more efficient because now you’re trying to sell to a real person instead of just a vague vision in your head. We actually recommend posting your ideal, target personas in the marketing office so everyone knows and understands who they are.

One of our favorite tools is from Hubspot. Make My Persona walks you through some questions that will help you generate your targeted persona.

Think about the Buyer’s Journey

A buyer’s journey is the steps consumers take to reach a verdict. It involves three stages, including awareness, consideration, and decision. When designing your B2B lead generation strategy, these steps play an integral role in the layout of the ads, offers & outreach.

The awareness stage is the moment a user identifies a problem exists. Consideration is when they examine and analyze different possible solutions for the problem they identified. Lastly, they decide and purchase the best solution.

The next step in defining your buyer persona is to determine the stage of their buyer’s journey. It will help in launching targeted paid campaigns to attract users in the awareness, consideration, or decision stages.

Additionally, it will help your content marketing. You can create and publish content targeting consumers in different stages of the buyer’s journey and help them move onto the next step.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is a widely accepted marketing tactic, continuously gaining recognition as digital marketing grows invaluable for businesses. By combining the best elements of inbound marketing with custom outreach to potential accounts, it helps technology marketers focus and create content for a particular group of prospects that all have influence on the buying decision.

Top Benefits of ABM include but aren’t limited to:

1. Granular & Optimized Messaging
2. Clear ROI
3. Reduced Resource Waste
4. Sales and Marketing Collab
5. Tracking Goals
6. Easier to Measure

Personalization Takes Center Role in Digital Marketing

Regardless of whether your consumers are B2B or B2C, personalization is fundamental for retaining customers in the long run. Plus, with the advanced technology now in the market, it is incredibly easy for businesses to leverage personalization for their marketing campaigns.

Tailoring marketing campaigns to suit the different buyer’s personas and stages of the buyer’s journey will help you build a positive brand image. Plus, if your users know you see them as real people with real needs, instead of just a statistic on your profits chart, they are likely to choose you over your competitors.

• According to Instapage, personalized emails delivery up to 6 times higher transaction rates.
• You can reduce your Customer Acquisition Cost by up to 50%
• 78% of consumers say that personal, relevant content will increase buyer intent

Quality Content is Still a Priority

Bill Gates coined the phrase, ‘content is king,’ in 1996. It’s 2020 now, and the wrords hold just as much importance, if not more. Quality content in any format is vital to the success of a marketing campaign.

Content creation applies to all facets of B2B tech marketing, including digital, email, and social media. It includes blog posts, PPC adverts, audio/video content, social media posts, and more.

But for any content to be effective, there are two challenges you need to overcome.

Firstly, content creation needs to align with your business goals and resonate with your target buyer personas.

Secondly, you need to distribute your content so that it reaches your audience and helps you reach your target ROI.

Building an Emotional Connection with Content is Vital

We talked about customizing your marketing campaigns to suit different target buyer personas and stages of a buyer’s journey. One aspect of personalization is to trigger an emotional connection between the brands and consumers.

Princeton researchers determined that first impressions are formed in less than 1 second.

Content that reflects your audience’s pain points will not just attract your customers, but also build trust, reliability, and credibility. So, you need to introduce your brand, products, or services by way of storytelling that elicits an emotional connection from your audience. It should encourage them to see you as not just another name in the market, but the answer to their problems.

Gatorade does a fantastic job here in their short on Usain Bolt & his family life:

Influencer Marketing Grows Increasingly Vital

Influence marketing is different for B2B tech marketers than it is for B2C businesses. Instead of celebrity testimonials, your customers are looking for reliable sources, authoritative, and research-backed evidence to help them decide why they should consider you.

What you need is client testimonials and case studies to encourage their decisions. Referrals from past or present clients work just as well. Alternatively, you can try partnering with podcasts to attract and engage your customers.

Join the Game with Your B2B Marketing Strategy!

An effective marketing strategy depends on various factors, including your budget, marketing channels, creative needs, and your target audience. Now that you know what makes an efficient B2B tech marketer, the next step is to plan your B2B marketing strategy.

The digital marketplace is ever-evolving and complicated. So, don’t hold back on getting assistance from other industry leaders that you can find on platforms like Top Firms.

So? Join revolutionize the marketing world with your practical marketing skills and earn a higher ROI for your B2B business!